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Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy by John LeCarre

Jan16

I read on Wikipedia that John LeCarre actually was a spy for the British espionage unit M-16, and that his cover was blown and his career ended by double agent Kim Philby. Gerald, the Soviet double agent in the book, is to some extent a portrait of Kim Philby, and the protagonist George Smiley is “modelled on former Lincoln (College) rector Vivian H. H. Green.”

So the novel has some basis in fact and history. I thought it was a good book, but I did have some trouble following the plot. Between the British slang and the dated slang (published in 1974) and, most of all, the spy-talk, I was lost a good deal of the time. Then, too, I have the unfortunate habit of skimming over sections whenever I lose the thread of the story looking for a place to pick it up again. I often do this skimming unconsciously, and I sometimes skip right over the thread I needed to find.

So I may have missed a few details, but I got the gist of the story. George Smiley is an unwillingly retired M-16 agent who’s called back in to deal with a possible Soviet double agent entrenched in the highest echelons of M-16. The novel tells about how Smiley goes about finding the double agent, and it also deals with the lack of trust fostered by an environment whose stock in trade is betrayal. In Smiley/LeCarre’s M-16, no one fully trusts anyone, with good cause. I didn’t understand how Smiley knew exactly who to interview in order to figure who the Soviet “mole” was, but I suppose it was buried somewhere in the jargon.

So it’s a spy novel with a theme, trust and the lack of trust, and betrayal in politics and in realtionships. (Smiley’s wife, by the way, is cheating on him and has been for quite some time, a fact that is not without significance in the world of LeCarre’s spy story.) I read that there are two more novels by Le Carre featuring the retired spymaster, George Smiley. I probably won’t look for them anytime soon, but if you’re interested in a spy novel with a little more depth than James Bond, you might take a look at Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. Then ‘splain the nuances to me.

Children of Men: The Movie

Jan15

On Saturday a couple of the older urchins and I went to see the movie Children of Men, based on a book by P.D. James by the same name. It’s rated R and deserves the rating. The language is monotonously foul, and there’s an inordinate amount of blood and violence. I also think the powers-that-made the movie tried to inject a political message into a story that was not originally about homeland security or illegal immigration.

Nevertheless, the movie has a message that shines through the language, the violence and the political agenda. A fallen world without children is shown to be a world without hope, and the birth of a child brings back hope despite the darkness and despair that permeate the movie’s near-future setting. The baby, as a living, breathing symbol, is so powerful in contrast to all the shooting and profanity of a world gone mad. I can see why the movie was released on Christmas; there are definite echoes of the Christmas story in the movie’s setting, characters, and plot.

The two main characters, Clive Owen as Theo and Clare-Hope Ashitey as Kee, were well acted and emotionally engaging. While it was obvious that Michael Caine as an aging hippie-type was playing a part and enjoying it immensely, the two actors that had to carry the movie did so with a verisimilitude that made me feel as if they were the characters they were portraying. They should both be nominated for an Academy Award.

I would suggest that reading the book by P.D. James would be twice as beneficial as seeing the movie, but the movie has a value of its own. I don’t see how even liberal, anti-Bush, pro-immigration activists could miss the central idea that “salvation” comes not by revolution or by journalistic propaganda (power to the people), but by means of a child, a child of promise. Much of the Christian symbolism and truth was drained from James’s story as it made its way from book to movie script, but the twin truths of the hopeless state of our world and the only source of renewed hope are at the heart of the story and couldn’t be completely disguised or eliminated.

See the movie only if you have a high tolerance for violence and profanity, although again it has redeeming value; read the book by all means.

Abide With Me by Elizabeth Strout

Jan14

I first saw this book recommended at the Breakpoint website. Then, I think I read this recommendation at MarysLibrary. So I finally got the book from the library and read it.

It was very good. Ms. Strout apparently knows something about small town life and about being a pastor or a pastor’s wife, even though the blurb says she lives in New York City. Abide With Me tells the story of Pastor Tyler Caskey who is serving in his first pastorate in the community of West Annett, Maine. The novel is set in the late 1950’s, about the same time I was born. Lots of period details give life to the story and make it seem real. People are worried about Khruschev and the Communist threat, building bomb shelters, how to survive a nuclear attack. Then, there are the more immediate concerns of the village, such as a new wife for Pastor Caskey whose wife Lauren died a year ago and what’s to be done about the pastor’s five year old daughter Katherine who’s misbehaving in church and in kindergarten. Tyler Caskey has his own thoughts and worries: should he support the church organist’s bid for a new organ and how can he please his congregation, his mother, and everyone else, including God? And will he ever experience The Feeling, that indefineable sense of God’s presence and blessing, again?

Abide With Me is novel about grief and about maturity. Tyler Caskey is a protagonist who reminds me of Engineer Husband; he wants everyone to be happy. Sometimes, if things are not right, he wants to pretend that they are. He’s not a man to make waves, to disturb the universe. Unfortunately, life doesn’t cooperate; suffering comes; and Tyler finds himself finally unable to cope with the trials of his congregants, the needs of his family, and his own grief and guilt over the death of his wife. Things come to a crisis on a Sunday morning, as Tyler is supposed to be preaching, and the inhabitants of West Annett receive an opportunity to give grace and mercy to the pastor who has tried to give them the Word of God in spite of his own brokenness.

Elizabeth Strout’s second novel reminds me a bit of Marilynne Robinson’s second novel Gilead. There’s the same gently descriptive writing, the same delight in the natural world and the dailyness of life, the same sort of pastoral protagonist, although Tyler Caskey is much younger than Robinson’s Reverend Ames. Both men are humble servant/leaders, reluctant to claim that they have all the answers or know the mind of God. If you liked Gilead, if you are a pastor or a pastor’s wife, if you are interested in an account of living a Christian, but imperfect, life, you should like Abide With Me. It’s the best book I’ve read this year so far.

From a sermon by Tyler Caskey (never delivered):

“Do you think that because we have learned the sun does not go down, that in fact we are going around at a dizzying speed, that the sun is not the only star in the heavens —do you think this means that we are any less important than we thought we were? Oh, we are far less important than we thought we were, and we are far, far more important than we think we are. Do you imagine that the scientist and the poet are not united? Do you assume you can answer the question of who we are and why we are here by rational thought alone? It is your job, your honor, your birthright, to bear the burden of this mystery. And it is your job to ask, in every thought, word and deed: How can love best be served?

God is not served when you speak with relish of rumors about those who are poor in spirit and cannot be defended; God is not served when you ignore the poverty of spirit within yourselves.”

Tyler says in the book that this sermon excerpt breaks one of the cardinal rules of homiletics. Do you know what rule he breaks? (I didn’t even know there was such a rule; I’m going to be listening carefully to my pastor’s sermon next Sunday to see if he ever breaks The Rule.)

To This Great Stage of Fools: Born January 11th

Jan11

Alan Paton, b.1903, d.1988. Mr. Paton is the South African author of at least three novels: Cry, the Beloved Country, Too Late the Phalarope, and Ah, But Your Land Is Beautiful. All three are well worth your reading time. Previous Alan Paton birthday posts:
Alan Paton and Cry, the Beloved Country.
Alan Paton’s other two novels.

If you like Cry, the Beloved Country, you should definitely read Paton’s other two novels. Then, you might also like these books, somewhat similar in style and/or subject matter.

Nectar in a Sieve by Kamala Markandaya is the story of Rukmani, the fourth daughter in a poor family in India. Her life, as she and her family become poorer and poorer, is still a life of dignity even in the most impoverished circumstances.

Peace Like a River by Leif Enger is also, like Cry, the Beloved Country, about love and forgiveness and about a prodigal son and the lengths to which a father will go to reclaim that son.

River Rising by Athol Dickson is similar to Cry, the Beloved Country in that it deals in a redemptive way with race and race relations, but the setting is Louisiana in the 1920’s.

Try any or all of these, but first, if you’ve never read Cry, the Beloved Country, do so. I highly recommend it.

Can’t Resist a Book Meme

Jan9

I grabbed this one from Kate’s Book Blog, and Kate got it from Italo Calvino’s novel, If on a winter’s night a traveler.

Books You’ve Been Planning To Read For Ages:
Kim by Rudyard Kipling
Wives and Daughters by Mrs. Gaskell
Winds of War by Herman Wouk
Most of the books on This List.

Books You’ve Been Hunting For Years Without Success:
Hardcover editions of the Snipp, Snapp, Snurr books by Maj Lindman. I have several of the recently re-issued paperbacks, but they’re not made well and keep falling apart.

Books Dealing With Something You’re Working On At The Moment:
Well, the books I need to read or re-read for my US history class and for my American literature class are:
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain.
Nothing Like It in the World by Stephen Ambrose
Mornings on Horseback by David McCullough
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Books You Want To Own So They’ll Be Handy Just In Case:
Random House Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary, Deluxe Edition

Books You Could Put Aside Maybe To Read This Summer:
Tender Is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Books You Need To Go With Other Books On Your Shelves:
I need some Madeleine L’Engle books to fill in my collection and to replace the falling-apart paperbacks.

Books That Fill You With Sudden, Inexplicable Curiosity, Not Easily Justified:
All of the books on This List.

Books You Needn’t Read or Books That Everybody’s Read So It’s As If You Had Read Them, Too
Left Behind by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins
Harry Potter (all of them) by J.K. Rowling. I think I’ve got the gist of the story from dinner table conversation and blog reading.
The Davinci Code by Dan Brown. Same thing, but not at the dinner table.

Books You Mean To Read But There Are Others You Must Read First
I need to read Plato before I read Augustine, right?
And shouldn’t Aristotle come before Plato?
Thank goodness, I have already read the Bible (and continue to do so).

Books That If You Had More Than One Life You Would Certainly Also Read But Unfortunately Your Days Are Numbered
Ulysses by James Joyce
The Koran
The Upanishads

Bee Season by Myla Goldberg and Atonement by Ian McEwan

Jan8

I’m not sure how many of my readers would enjoy or appreciate these two novels. I’m not sure how much I enjoyed them, although they were both intriguing. I’ve seen Bee Season on various lists and thought it might be something I would like reading given our current interest in spelling bees. However, the book is only tangentially about spelling bees. It’s more about words and Jewish/Eastern mysticism and chanting and letters and insanity. In the end, I think the insanity wins. It’s about a family that is falling apart because the family members are mentally aberrant, all four of them, each in his or her own way. The father is controlling and overly absorbed in the achievements of his two children, but distant when it comes to emotional interaction. The mother is literally mentally ill and extremely distant from her husband and her children. The son, Aaron, becomes a member of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON, or Hare Krishnas) because his emotional needs for affirmation and love are not being met at home or anywhere else. And the daughter, Eliza, spells —really well, so well that she believes that God will speak to her through letters. As I said, the insanity wins; the family disintegrates; and the denouement (n. the final part of a play, movie, or narrative in which the strands of the plot are drawn together and matters are explained or resolved) isn’t.

Atonement was a much more satisfying read. (WARNING) The two books share a theme (family disintegration) and a predeliction for more graphic sexual description than I am comfortable reading, but Atonement was more believable, even redeeming in a way. Whereas I had little or no hope after reading Bee Season that the characters in the book would ever come to some kind of peace or healing or forgiveness, Atonement has some hope for, well, atonement and forgiveness.

Atonement is written in three parts: two near-halves and then a shorter sort of epilogue that (WARNING) turns everything in the book upside down and makes you doubt your reactions to and evaluations of the entire story. The first section, the set-up, moves rather slowly. But the events in the first part are the core about which the the rest of the book revolves. Read carefully and note the characters’ differing points of view and their inability to understand what is really going on in anyone else’s mind.

The second part takes place mostly in France and in England at the beginning of the Second World War, in particular the evacuation of Dunkirk. This section is violent, but appropriately so. War is violent and nasty and uncontrollably insane. Even in England, two of the characters in the novel are working in a hospital, so they, too, see the violence and suffering that war brings. In this section of the book, the past impacts the present and breaks the family into distinct units, each an island of bitterness and misunderstanding.

The third part of the novel is, as I said, surprising, and you’ll have to read it for yourself. If you decide to read the novel, no fair peeking at the ending. You probably wouldn’t understand without the first two parts anyway.

The ending to Bee Season is somewhat surprising, too, although I could see it coming a little beforehand. It’s not nearly as thought-provoking. I did like the parts in Bee Season about the mentally ill mom; for some reason I’m captivated by stories of insanity and eccentricity. Maybe I’m on the edge myself?

Oh, by the way, Bee Season has been made into a “major motion picture”; my copy has a picture of Richard Gere on the cover, so I’m assuming he stars as the dad. Has anyone seen it?

Ian McEwan, the author of Atonement, has written and published several other novels, including one called Amsterdam which won the Booker Prize in 1998. Has anyone read it?

A Winter’s Love by Madeleine L’Engle

Jan1

I have several projects for January; one of them is to read/reread the major works of one of my favorite authors, Madeleine L’Engle. Some of you may not know that Ms. L’Engle wrote adult fiction as well as the Newbery-award winning fantasy A Wrinkle in Time and its sequels. In fact, all of her books are difficult to confine to one age group or target audience. I think that’s because Ms. L’Engle wrote about her own concerns and didn’t consciously write to a particular audience.

A Winter’s Love was one of her early novels published in 1957, the year of my birth, before the success of A Wrinkle in Time. It was good story to start out my journey through Madeleine L’Engle’s books because it was one of her first novels published and because it takes place just before Christmas. The setting is a Swiss village resort in the Alps; Emily and Courtney Bowen (Courtney is the husband) and their two daughters, Virginia and Connie, are living in a rented chalet. The family is from New York, but Courtney is on a sort of writing sabbatical from teaching classics in a New York university. Sixteen year old Virginia is home for the holidays from her European boarding school, and she has a friend spending the holidays with here, Mimi Oppenheimer.

The action and conflict in the novel are internal, rather than external. Nothing much happens. Emily begins the novel looking out a window at the stars and thinking about her life; she ends the story standing outdoors in the snow looking over the landscape and thinking. Yet, from that beginning to that ending, much has happened inside Emily Bowen. She’s made decisions that will affect her family and her friends for the rest of their lives. The novel is really about a marriage and about the temptation to have an affair or get a divorce when that marriage isn’t working well. Not only is Emily’s marriage not sustaining her; she has very little hope that she can ever communicate with and love her emotionally distant and closed husband, Court. And the Other Man, Abe Fielding, is so open and nurturing and available that Emily can’t help falling in love. She spends the rest of the novel trying to decide what to do about her new love and her old love and her children and ultimately herself.

As far as classification goes, I think this novel, were it to be published today, would be classifed as young adult fiction mostly because of the young adult characters, Virginia and Mimi, Sam, Abe’s son, and Sam’s friend, Beanie. However, the overwhelming theme of the novel is adult: what is the meaning of marriage and how does love grow and change and remain faithful to itself. I don’t think this is Madeleine L’Engle’s best novel, but it is a very creditable effort. She has at least three novels that were published before this one, Ilsa, The Small Rain and And Both Were Young, and I’d like to get those next so that I can read the novels in semi-chronological order. (I’ve already read A Small Rain and maybe And Both Were Young, but I’m planning to re-read them.) Virginia Bowen and Mimi Oppenheimer both appear in later L’Engle novels as minor characters.

Moby Dick by Herman Melville

Dec19

Characters:
Ishmael, the narrator.
Queequeg
Father Mapple
Captain Peleg
Captain Bildad
Captain Ahab
Starbuck, First Mate
Stubb, Second mate
Flask, Third Mate

“And there is all the difference in the world between paying and being paid. The act of paying is perhaps the most uncomfortable infliction that the two orchard thieves entailed upon us. But BEING PAID,–what will compare with it? The urbane activity with which a man receives money is really marvellous, considering that we so earnestly believe money to be the root of all earthly ills, and that on no account can a monied man enter heaven. Ah! how cheerfully we consign ourselves to perdition!”

“Better sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian.” (Really???)

“It may seem ridiculous, but it reminded me of General Washington’s head, as seen in the popular busts of him. It had the same long regularly graded retreating slope from above the brows, which were likewise very projecting, like two long promontories thickly wooded on top. Queequeg was George Washington cannibalistically developed.”
Ah, well, as long as the sober cannibal looks like George Washington!

“One of the wild suggestions referred to, as at last coming to be linked with the White Whale in the minds of the superstitiously inclined, was the unearthly conceit that Moby Dick was ubiquitous; that he had actually been encountered in opposite latitudes at one and the same instant of time.”
The Whale as God.

“Yea, foolish mortals, Noah’s flood is not yet subsided; two thirds of the fair world it yet covers.”

“Consider all this; and then turn to this green, gentle, and most docile earth; consider them both, the sea and the land; and do you not find a strange analogy to something in yourself? For as this appalling ocean surrounds the verdant land, so in the soul of man there lies one insular Tahiti, full of peace and joy, but encompassed by all the horrors of the half known life. God keep thee! Push not off from that isle, thou canst never return!”
But David wrote, “Where can I go from your Spirit?
Where can I flee from your presence?
If I go up to the heavens, you are there;
if I make my bed in the depths, you are there.”

“All men live enveloped in whale-lines. All are born with halters round their necks; but it is only when caught in the swift, sudden turn of death, that mortals realize the silent, subtle, ever-present perils of life. And if you be a philosopher, though seated in the whale-boat, you would not at heart feel one whit more of terror, than though seated before your evening fire with a poker, and not a harpoon, by your side.”

Recurring themes:
Cannibalism, barbarism versus civilization. The Nantucketers are “fighting Quakers, Quakers with a vengeance.”
Life and death, whiteness, darkness.
Religion, idolatry, Christianity.
Revenge, insanity.

We read Moby Dick, or The Whale for my American Literature class, and I must admit that once again just as I did in high school, I only made it about three-fourths of the way through the book. So who’s actually read Moby Dick all the way through, whiteness of the whale and all?

I was encouraged to read Susan Wise Bauer’s confession in The Well-Educated Mind: “My bete noir is Moby Dick; I know it’s one of the great works of American literature, but I have made at least eight runs at it during my adult life and have never managed to get past midpoint.” I’m only on my second try; maybe I’ll give it another read in a couple of years and see if I can finish. As you can see, I did glean something from the part I read.

The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield

Nov27

Twins. Ghosts. Insanity. Murder. Large English country houses. Odd dreams. Libraries full of books. Numerous references to Jane Eyre

This book has all the ingredients and they’re stirred together well. I recommended it to Eldest Daughter as soon as I finshed it on Thanksgiving, and she stayed up until after 1:00 AM reading it. ‘Nuff said.

However, I’m going to write some more because I can’t resist. I read a book a long time ago about a pair of British twins who were mentally disturbed; I think it was a nonfiction case study, but it may have been fiction. I still remember how very odd the twins were and how one twin controlled the other using nonverbal cues and a secret twin language. The book also told about how the twins were separated and sent to different institutions in hope of improving their mental conditions. I’m really wondering if Ms. Setterfield read that same book or another similar one. I wish I could remember the title.

All that to say, this book is about mentally disturbed twins. It’s also about Story, the stories we live out and the narratives we create to make sense of our lives. The book is about lies and truth, too, and the boundaries that separate the two.

“I will tell you my story, beginning at the beginning, continuing with the middle, and with the end at the end. Everything in its proper place. No cheating. No looking ahead. No questions. No sneaky glances at the last page.”

The narrator doesn’t exactly cheat on this commitment, but Ms. Setterfield, the author behind the narrator, does. The story doesn’t go directly from beginning to end; it comes to a seeming end and then backtracks to tell the same story from a different perspective which changes everything.

“In a single moment, a moment of vertiginous, kaleidoscopic bedazzlement, the story Miss Winter had told me unmade and remade itself, in every event identical, in every detail the same —yet entirely, profoundly different. Like those images that reveal a young bride if you hold the page one way, and an old crone if you hold it the other.”

I said that The Thirteenth Tale contains numerous references to Jane Eyre, and others have compared the book itself to Charlotte Bronte’s works. However, I think it’s much too wild and borderline insane to fit into the essentially staid and conservative Victorian world of the Brontes. In Jane Eyre, the madwoman spends most of her time locked in the attic, only escaping to bring the story to its denouement. In The Thirteenth Tale the insane run free, and the sane are required to hide in attics and closets. Futhermore, in The Thirteenth Tale and in The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins, the Victorian author I would compare Setterfield to, as madness runs amuck, spreading chaos and mayhem throughout the countryside, it becomes difficult to judge who is sane and who is mad and and who is telling the truth and who is lying and who is simply evil.

For sheer gothic fun and mystery, pick up The Thirteenth Tale. Oh, I almost forgot, if you love words, you’ll enjoy the language and style of this book, too. Note the quotations above, especially the second one. I had to look up “vertiginous”. It means “causing or having to do with vertigo.” What a great word!

the curious incident of the dog in the night-time by Mark Haddon

Nov21

I’m always a little late because I get most of my books from the library or the used bookstore. So I’m just now reading this book, published in 2003, that I remember lots of bloggers talking about last year. To add to the acclamation, I thought it was wonderful.

If you’ve never read the book or read about the book, it’s the story of Christopher John Francis Boone, age 15 years, 3 months, and 2 days, who decides to investigate the death under mysterious circumstances of a dog named Wellington. Christopher knows a lot of things —the names of all the countries of the world and their capitals, every prime number up to 7057, and the steps to take in detecting a crime ala Sherlock Holmes; however, he also knows that there many things he doesn’t understand —how to read the expressions on people’s faces, metaphors, and belief in the supernatural, to name a few. Christopher is autistic, and his autism causes him to observe things that other people don’t notice. It also causes him to discount things that can’t be explained logically. He’s good at math, bad at relationships.

In one part of his book, written in first person from Christopher’s point of view, Christopher discusses how he likes Sherlock Holmes, but dislikes Holmes’s creator, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. He dislikes Doyle because Doyle became interested in the supernatural, particularly seances and ghosts, after the death of his son in World War II. As I read, I was left with a picture of a boy who likes Sherlock Holmes because he’s safe and predictable, because he follows the logic of the fictional detective, but can’t stand the writer who made Sherlock Holmes because Doyle is more complicated and believes in things outside the conventions of fiction. Christopher is a boy who is limited by a quirk of the mind, although quite intelligent, limited to his “maths” and his science and his safe home and his strict version of literal truth.

And, for example, some people say how can an eye happen by accident? Because an eye has to evolve from something else very like an eye and it doesn’t just happen because of a genetic mistake, and what is the use of half an eye? But half an eye is very useful because half an eye means that an animal can see half of an animal that wants to eat it and get out of the way, and it will eat that animal that only has a third of an eye or 49% of an eye instead because it hsn’t got out of the way quick enough, and the animal that is eaten won’t have babies because it is dead. And 1% of an eye is better than no eye.

So, the ever logical Christopher reduces Irreducible Complexity to nonsense. Except, of course, Christopher’s explanation is itself nonsense. Half of an eye isn’t useful at all, and 1% of an eye is not better than no eye. If I have only a few rods and cones floating about with no cornea or retina or nerves leading to the brain or whatever, I have nothing. Such a thing would never evolve. And Christopher’s superior intelligence combined with an autism that causes him to miss out on many of the skills he needs to survive in human society is not an evolutonary adaptation that will make him more likely to survive and reproduce, but rather a seriously tragic handicap that requires the help of others and the bravery and resourcefulness of Christopher himself for him to transcend his own blindness and be able to live a real, connected life.

Christopher doesn’t believe in God, but his flawed, but loving parents and other people who help him to survive the journey that he embarks upon demonstrate the truth that God believes in Christopher and has provided a way for him to survive and even thrive in spite of his limitations. I wanted to quote to Christopher many times over the course of the story, “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

I really enjoyed the way author Mark Haddon was able to climb inside the mind of a high-functioning autistic young adult and present his thoughts to the reader. I don’t know if the book accurately portrays the thoughts and attitudes of an autistic person, but it feels right, and I liked Christopher in spite of his somewhat self-centered outlook on life. I wonder if Mr. Haddon knows someone or is close to someone who is autistic?

The curious incident of the dog in the night-time is short, thoughtful, and absorbing. It’s hopeful without being unrealistic about the problems facing both those with autism and their care-givers.